


barbed wire and bone

by wreathed



Series: Officer Class [2]
Category: British Comedy RPF, Nathan Barley (TV) RPF
Genre: Light Bondage, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mindfuck, Orgasm Denial, Porn, Prostate Massage, Sadism, Slapping, Submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 04:11:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19143313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: Immediately followsPoland. Set in 2017.





	barbed wire and bone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trash_bat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_bat/gifts).



Charlie knows with immediate, sickening certainty that he’s actually going to go; that’s the terrifying thing. Why would he do it now, after waiting for this long? 

The truth is that if he can’t now, just after he’s won two prestigious awards and every single other person he knows seems to have been dazzled into treating him like a career-best overachiever, he can’t ever. So he makes his excuses, tense and aching behind the eyes after the transatlantic flight, even in business class, and gets a taxi to Soho. Same office, just a colder time of year. And the small matter of all that time.

He’s older, but the climb up all those stairs seems easier. Maybe it’s the anticipation, maybe he’s forgotten what it actually felt like, or maybe it’s the giving up smoking, and all that running. That would do it.

He has more experience now of being in charge of things than he did back then. He’s used to coming into a room now and overseeing everything, being the person people are asking for direction – at least when Annabel’s not there to save him. He’s not always comfortable with it, but he’s used to it. Maybe this will be too different now. Too many changes. Maybe it won’t work at all.

When the writing and filming for the series had finished, he had been so blindsided by the experience that he had found it terrifyingly difficult to make himself write on his own, alone in a room under normal conditions. Although he had tried to remind himself that he had always been a chronic procrastinator, it was more than that: nothing had felt the same. With no-one there to judge him, he had retreated to playing the _Counter-Strike_ sequel and wanking three times a day, each and every time perversely getting off from imagining Chris sternly telling him to stop. It normally stopped being quite as good by the third; if only there _had_ been Chris telling him to stop.

His fingers had itched to email Chris and angle for an invite back (pathetic), but honestly, what would he have said? _Can’t write without you. Please lock me in your sweltering hellhole of an office and whack me around the face until I can focus._ He’d laughed nervously at the mere thought.

Filming _Barley_ , it had turned out, would not be without incident – he hadn’t been sure if Chris had planned that or not – but even then they’d never come back to this room. Then there had been the work on series two: storyline ideas in gastropubs, workshops with the actors in studio spaces. Chris had not given an indication that there would be any sort of return to how they had been working in the past.

The ideas hadn’t worked. Charlie had drifted away to more urgent projects. The second series never happened.

Otherwise, there had been occasional messages and interactions over the intervening years: a convivial drip-feed of professional updates and polite congratulations, nothing suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary whatsoever. Run-ins at parties that had been warm and enjoyable had made Charlie want desperately to fall back into it, the space his brain hadn’t forgotten, but he’d always managed to remind himself of where he was, everyone watching. 

For a couple of years there had been no word after Chris had seemed unusually angry the last time he had seen him, until Charlie had received one of the infamously psychotic Christmas cards – and before he had opened it had been pitifully pleased to have that year, for whatever reason, made the grade. A single curved line of barbed wire, a chipped piece of bone, perhaps taken from the beak in a bird skull or something like it, and, affixed just above that, a small vial of white, viscous liquid. _Yours. Chris_ , reads the back, full stop not comma, and, with a sickening hurtle of dread, Charlie had thought of the condom that Chris had knotted and not visibly thrown away. He had panicked and shoved the card at the back of his bottom desk drawer, and only then realised that, surely, it wouldn’t look anything like that so many years later. It wasn’t real. That _sick_ fuck. 

Back then, Charlie hadn’t read it as anything other than a maniacal threat, but perhaps it had been a renewed offer.

Then the time Chris had written in response to Charlie, outright: _Do you want to write with me again?_ , and Charlie had sat there, heart in his mouth, and never responded: he had been brutally busy and, more to the point, he had thought _he really just means write, couldn’t be anything more after all this time, once Chris finishes a project he loses all interest – wants to start something new_. And he hadn’t wanted to think any more about the possibility of _that_ : the something new, or the someone. So he’d pushed the thought of it all the way down.

The walls in the stairwell have been repainted a brighter white since he was last here, but that doesn’t stop the automatic response in him being dredged up from muscle memory: his bones thrum with a flight-or-fight anticipation, and every step he uses to lift himself up higher brings up a memory of some depraved thing that was once done to him. Taking that plug. Holding Chris’s dick in his mouth, dead still. Kneeling; so much kneeling, to the point of standing up to full height, still several inches shorter than Chris, feeling unnatural. It all makes his stomach turn over.

Charlie knocks on the office door.

“Come in, Charlie,” Chris calls out, and just like that Charlie gets the same churning feeling, like he’s stepping into the headmaster’s office and he doesn’t know what he’s done wrong but he’s about to be found out.

Charlie looks, he hopes surreptitiously, down from the surprisingly similar face and hair to the enormous trainers on Chris’s feet, and decides he’s not so much a headmaster as a very tall pupil who has staged an anarchist coup and taken over the school.

“It’s good to see you,” Charlie says inanely. “I can’t stay long.”

Charlie can just about catch sight of the computer screen from where he’s standing, and in a window that covers about half the screen he spots a video, low-quality grainy webcam footage, paused on a gruelling close-up of his face at the point of climax the last time he had been in this room and it’s a shock of ice-hot dread prickling under his skin, the barefaced evidence of it, the idea that Chris has seen it over and over while Charlie has left it to be disregarded.

The tight hot feeling in his stomach, he belatedly realises, isn’t only fear.

Then Chris, in a manner that’s not ungainly despite his height, sinks to his knees on the carpeted floor, putting his palms flat on his knees.

“This is the way it should be now, don’t you think,” Chris says, but it’s in a very dangerous voice that Charlie doesn’t trust at all. “Now you’re so successful. Tell me what to do. Show me how to be like you. Get your own back. Make me take it. I don’t have anything I can possibly teach someone as adored as you are.”

He looks down at Chris, who looks all wrong down there, like someone who’s put shoes on their knees, and the enormity of the requested task overwhelms him. Here is a man who is so sure of himself he has exhaustedly got anything he wanted made, has fearlessly lied with such confidence to get access to things he shouldn’t have access to. How would you ever go about humiliating him? 

“Don’t,” Charlie says. The sight makes him feel nauseous. “Stop doing that.”

“Why?”

“You’re only going to twist it around, you’re only going to… You look stupid.” _Is that how I look_ , he thinks. _Is that how I looked. Is that how I look on camera, time-capsuled, viewable at any time_.

“ _You_ didn’t look stupid, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Chris says, looking at him unnervingly as if he could see right into the deepest recesses of his brain. “You looked like you were made for it.”

It’s praise – not predictable, by-rote praise for his work, but praise for what he’s good for – and Charlie glows from it. “I don’t want you to film this,” Charlie says, looking at the computer screen, thinking about how to time-limit what they are about to do to just this once. Wondering how to contain it.

“That’s not the kind of choice you get,” Chris says, and Charlie blushes hot at the idea of Chris thinking he’s insolent. Chris looks up at him again, and Charlie feels dizzy. “It’s good to see you. Meeting here again was a good idea of yours.”

“It was _not_ my idea,” Charlie says, suddenly livid and wrong-footed, a mind-consuming combination. Chris is still on the floor, watching him. “You started this. None of this was my idea.”

“I can see this is going to be a waste of time. I’ll show you out,” Chris says, elegantly springing to full height again and heading for the office door.

So Charlie has to tell him _no; wait_. 

Chris is never found as expected. And he always makes Charlie _say_ it.

“‘Wait?’” Chris repeats sharply in a voice that’s a little like Charlie’s own, as if Charlie has made a disappointingly poor rhetorical argument.

“You knew what I wanted,” Charlie says, looking at his shoes. His head thrums with tiredness, being pushed down by a hit of fresh adrenaline. “And you know why I’m here now.”

“But you learned, in the end,” Chris says, “how to write good scripts without me.”

“I learned how to induce terror for myself, if that’s what you mean,” Charlie says sourly. “Eventually. There are, you know, programmes and apps and things that scream at you until you do something. Seemed to do the trick.”

Chris laughs, delighted. “I’m obsolete.”

“I don’t need them most of the time now,” Charlie says, avoiding Chris’s eyes. “A deadline and I’ll do it. No time to dick about anymore. But yeah, I need something. For focus. I don’t have your self-control.” He can’t shut himself up, now, for example. “And yeah, I was happy we won, for about ten minutes. And then I panicked and thought _how am I going to top that_ , you know? The expectations are even higher. So I thought I might need something more. So I wondered, I wondered…”

He has an image of himself lodged in his brain: hands grasping sharp, cold metal, on his knees, his mouth filled. His real, non-imaginary, mouth waters. Not that. He’s not asking for that.

“I don’t actually have the awards with me,” Charlie says, suddenly feeling apologetic, as if he’s unable to prove his achievement to a man he’s spent so long looking up to. “Annabel has them for now. She’s going to take them into the office.”

“You do deserve a reward,” Chris says thoughtfully. “I don’t think you want any more nice congratulations. I’m not going to give you something nice, because that’s not what you want. But what was your favourite thing, of what we did? What do you want _more_ of the most?

He didn’t want to have to choose. He wanted to do whatever Chris suggested, but Chris was making him choose. Every memory he had of it all ran through his mind, and for a moment he felt overwhelmed. Should they be doing this? He’s not sure if it’s sex, strictly speaking, or something else. Better to keep proceedings towards the end of something else, for all their sakes, and they’re older now; deep sick hot flash of memory of mounting Chris on the sofa (Charlie jerks his head around to look – it’s still the same sofa) and thickly filling himself up inch by inch notwithstanding.

 _And what would Chris like?_ some terrible part of his brain pipes up. Whatever Charlie might want is one thing, but he also harbours a deep desire to say something that will make Chris shiver.

Sometimes watching Chris and trying to work out how turned on he had been would be all he had, because Chris would barely _touch_ him – on those days, he had wanted to watch Charlie squirm and plead, he himself keeping a certain distance.

He wants Chris to touch him.

“I want you,” Charlie gasps out, swallowing down his excruciating embarrassment, “to hit me across the face.”

Chris’s eyes flash darkly. “A bit boring, but I can work with that,” he says disparagingly, but underneath his expression he looks almost as pulled-in as Charlie feels. “If I hit you hard enough for it to really hurt. Kneel on the floor.”

Charlie doesn’t care anymore: he doesn’t care about how he looks when his knees hit the floor with a quiet thump in his haste to comply; doesn’t care how keen he looks. He kneels down with his thighs against his calves and his legs slightly apart. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, but Chris will tell him soon. This is his reward. He lets his chest rise and fall, the anticipation build. He can feel he’s getting hard, but tries to drift, let the feeling be incidental.

Chris takes a tie from the top drawer of his desk – it’s a horrible one, so it’s probably one of his favourites – and ties Charlie’s wrists together behind his back. As soon as Charlie can’t move, he gets an itch on his nose. He waits for it to fade away.

Chris, tall in any case but looking even taller to Charlie from this position, languidly takes the unbuttoned right-hand cuff of his shirt and rolls the sleeve up to his elbow. It makes Charlie’s stomach roll, being made to wait and wait for it, seeing the slow reveal of Chris’s pale forearm skin.

Chris stands in front of him, his crotch at Charlie’s eye level but too far away for Charlie to be able to easily put his face up against it. It’s hard to tell, under the loose trousers Chris is wearing, whether he’s at all affected or not. Yes, he’s interested, but what kind of interest? Sometimes Chris got hard, sometimes he didn’t. Charlie was never sure what made the difference, and hadn’t asked.

Chris raises his hand. “Don’t close your eyes, Charlie,” Chris says, and from the effort of keeping them open Charlie feels them well up almost immediately.

The first hit. He feels the sting of it, and then Chris’s large hand comes back to rest over the entire side of his face. He clings to the intimacy, rubbing his cheek against it.

“Don’t,” Chris says firmly, and Charlie gives a contrite _sorry_ and resumes his original position.

The second one, on his other cheek. He sways to one side from the impact. His skin must already be pinkening up. He realises, after he hears the sound and feels the sting, that one was a little harder. He’s aching from it, minutely thrusting up into the air because he can’t touch himself.

Another slap, harder again. He bows his head, his body slumping forward from the shock of it.

“This won’t do,” Chris mutters to himself as he stops to dig his fingernails hard into the skin at the back of Charlie’s neck, making Charlie cry out, and Charlie worries then: what _hasn’t_ he done, what has he done wrong, what hasn’t been enough?

“I know you tend to slouch, Charlie,” Chris says, and Charlie feels the delicious panic hammer through him at the thought of what might come next. Somewhere beneath it all, he tries to meticulously catalogue the tight feel of Chris’s large hands on him as Chris briskly pushes him back into an upright position. “I don’t want you slouching for this, because I don’t want to have to lean down too much. So we’re going to try this again, all right?”

A modicum of the touch he craves comes from the pads of Chris’s fingers leaving the nape of his neck. Charlie takes a deep breath and keeps his back ramrod straight, his body straining from it. His dick feels like iron by now, trapped in his jeans.

The next slap comes, on his left cheek this time, and he manages to stay still but makes a loud grunt from the effort. That makes Chris smile twitchily.

The next one is hard and loud, hitting the right side of his face, and Charlie cries out in surprise, wavering forwards from the pain. This time Chris makes an irritated noise as if he’s not trying hard enough and wretches Charlie’s head back up by his hair. His hair’s long enough for that now, he realises distantly, and wonders whether Chris will do that again. He’s looking up and up at Chris standing in front of him, who’s watching him like he’s a science experiment.

“Good,” Chris says, and he definitely sounds affected now, all from watching Charlie, and Charlie feels a savage rise of victory. “Make sure you carry yourself like that away from here, nice and proud, so no-one can see how dirty you are.” Charlie moans at that, feeling a blush rise on his tingling-warm face.

“Undo my jeans,” Charlie babbles, wondering how his stinging cheeks look, wondering how he’s gone so long without this feeling. “ _Anything_ , please. I need it.”

“You wanted this,” Chris says firmly. “You specifically stated that you wanted this when I gave you the choice, above anything else – or at least this was the first thing that popped into your silly, suggestible head – and we’re going to carry on until I want to stop.”

Charlie feels his breathing ricochet up a further notch. That’s Chris all over, that is. Didn’t care if over-run before they lost the light meant they were filming into the twelfth hour; got everyone, however exhausted, following along with him.

The _Barley_ shoot had been relentless. It had felt… well, it had felt like getting slapped across the face.

Which apparently was exactly what he wanted. _Jesus_.

Then Chris hits him _hard_ , several times in a row without stopping. Charlie feels his wrists try and move apart from each other, the way they’re being held giving him a twinge in his arms, and feels his face burn and his vision blur from the tears in his eyes. He shudders, his body rebelling, and he cries out, the pain connecting down to the ache between his legs.

“Please,” Charlie says, catching his breath once Chris stops, but he barely knows what he’s asking for.

“What do you want?” Chris asks.

With a heroic effort, Charlie straightens up.

“Whatever you want. I don’t know, I… Whatever I need to do for you to let me come. _Please_.”

“Do you think you deserve to? I’d rather you had some sort of motivation to return. I can already tell from that sorry display that you don’t have any self-control worth praising. I think you’ve forgotten. It’s a world of instant gratification these days, isn’t it? Projects rushed out, no time spent perfecting.”

Panic rises again. If he _didn’t_ … How his younger self did all that unbearable waiting, he can’t recall. He’s going to have to count back hysterically from ten. He’ll try and do it in his head, but it might just slip out.

Chris walks right up him. Charlie bends his neck right back to look at up Chris, hoping to convey gratitude. Like this, the flies of Chris’s trousers are right in front of Charlie’s face, a bulge now clearly visible.

“Let me suck you,” Charlie says, feeling consumed by how much he wants his mouth filled up. “Do you want to use my mouth. Shut me up. Make me choke.”

Chris looks down at him from up on high, eyes half-lidded but face dismissive. “It’s not me who wants that,” he says, and Charlie once again feels wrong-footed. Look at him, for fuck’s sake: even Chris must want _something_.

Chris gets his hand up, and for one weighty moment Charlie thinks he’s going to get hit again, but instead Chris’s thumb runs over Charlie’s bottom lip and Charlie immediately goes for the tip, distantly aware that he’s whining out loud and Chris looks as if he’s not even fussed about the sight of Charlie’s mouth, just the whining and wet sounds Charlie’s making.

“You can't just slap me and get me like this and then send me on my way,” Charlie says once Chris pops his thumb back out.

“I thought you needed to go?”

“Can you just— please,” Charlie says, lunging forward with his mouth from his kneeling position. He breathes in against the distended flies of Chris’s trousers, his mouth falling open. How had he ever imagined he would get himself back in here and go without what’s underneath?

“You didn’t ask for it earlier,” Chris says. Charlie is aware enough to detect a new looseness to Chris’s voice as Charlie doesn’t move his head from from its spot. “Have some self-control. Stick to what you planned.”

“It’s what _you’ve_ planned that matters,” Charlie says into Chris’s thigh, his wrists still tied together. “I’ve come here because I’ve got no fucking idea what I’m doing.”

“Don’t be absurd,” says Chris sharply. “Don’t insult my intelligence. That’s not why you’re—”

“Well, I—”

“— _Here at all_ ,” continues Chris without pause, raising his voice over Charlie’s. “Did you think you were making a special trip over here to swill champagne and talk shop? I happen to know you’ve had more than enough of that. _That’s_ why you’re here.”

Scrunching his eyes shut in frustration, Charlie forces himself to lean back away from Chris’s crotch. His eyes flick back there, though, and he sees with a twinge of shame and excitement the damp patch of his own spit he’s left behind. Charlie looks up at Chris and shoots him a look of resolute frustration. He watches Chris’s tongue dart out and back in again against his lips.

Charlie thinks again about that hard heat deep in his mouth, what it would feel like, and, with a stab of desperate desire, about Chris flipping him over and taking him that way too.

“So, you’re drawing the line here,” Charlie says, not caring that he sounds petulant and desperate.

“For now,” Chris says shortly, and Charlie’s frustrated moan comes from the back of his throat. Chris goes behind him then to untie his wrists, discarding the tie to one side. “Besides, you’re useless to me this tired and strung-out. Take a nap. I’ll keep the room warm enough for you.”

“You’re the one who summoned me straight off the plane.”

“I didn’t _summon_ you. You’ve turned me down before.”

That shuts up Charlie up for a second. He hears himself swallow.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep,” Charlie mumbles, pushing the heels of his newly-freed hands against his eyelids. “The time’s all wrong. I’m awake and exhausted both at once.”

“ _Quod erat demonstrandum_ ,” Chris says with a raise of his eyebrows. “You’re making no sense whatsoever.”

“You know what I mean,” Charlie bites back, just about resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Still have trouble sleeping?”

“Of course,” Chris says, stretching out then retracting his fingers, then he smiles. “I know what will help you sleep.” There’s a light in his dark eyes. Charlie’s heart hammers and more blood rushes downwards.

Charlie’s inside leap as Chris goes to his desk drawers, then tells Charlie to sit up on the sofa and take off all his clothes. If it’s the toy again, Charlie would take it – god, he would take it happily, he thinks, as his waistband drags uncomfortably over his erection when he pulls his trousers and underwear down.

With a slight lurch of disappointment, he blinks and looks back over to Chris, who has returned only holding a bottle of lubricant. He gets a glob in the curve of two of his long fingers, and excitement spikes up in Charlie again, his cock now hard against his stomach.

Chris goes straight in with two fingers, without going slowly or waiting for the muscle to ease. His fingers feel huge inside him and Charlie grunts as the edge of pain there. Chris’s inscrutable face is right there, close, watching Charlie’s reactions carefully.

Chris leaves his fingers in there for a while without moving them much, stroking very gently. Charlie watches, gripped, at the point where Chris’s fingers have gone into him, and then feels them curve slightly as the pads of Chris’s fingers find what they’re looking. Charlie gasps out loudly, so loud in the room.

 _Oh_. He thinks he knows what Chris is going to do, and feels want and dread in equal measure.

“Do not move your hands,” Chris says dangerously, looking Charlie right in the eye, and Charlie grips the edges of the sofa cushions and nods dumbly.

Chris’s fingers are still moving. Charlie’s head falls against the back of the sofa. His dick has leaked a few drops of liquid onto his stomach.

When Chris’s tongue goes between his legs and pushes in alongside his fingers, Charlie has to tense his arms to stop himself from bringing a hand to his aching cock. In the face of the tight heat there, he’s leaking again, and Charlie, feeling slightly dazed, looks down at the pool of his own precome on his stomach.

Chris looks up from between his legs, moving his mouth away – Charlie wriggles at the loss – and adds more lube, pulling his fingers out and teasingly circling the rim of Charlie’s hole before pushing back in and rubbing in a slow, tight circle.

Charlie’s muscles clench when he starts to feel a rush building up inside him, but Chris withdraws again, gently this time, looking calmed by the frustrated noise Charlie is crying out.

Chris keeps the focus on the edges of that spot as he adds a third finger – Charlie’s hips buck up – and keeps an intense watch on Charlie as Charlie’s thighs start to shake. Another moment later, Charlie’s drifting close again and there’s another withdrawal. Charlie whines out in frustration, clenching his inner thighs.

“You’re evil,” he gasps out, and Chris’s face splits into a grin.

“Do you want to come?” Chris asks.

“ _Yes_ ,” Charlie gets out between breaths. “Of course I fucking do.”

“Make sure you don’t,” Chris says crisply, and that just makes Charlie moan again.

So Charlie watches helplessly, filled up by three fingers, as Chris keeps up the light, intermittent, relentless strokes and the sweat builds on Charlie’s forehead as he resists the overwhelming urge to grab his cock himself and tip over the edge.

It feels rough, a revocation of something that keeps getting just within reach, but it feels like… _This_ is what he deserves, not the applause, the statuettes, the teenagers in a screening audience who puts their hands up and say _what advice would you give to people looking to break into the industry_ ; none of that.

“You can do it,” Chris says softly, as Charlie panted and twisted, felt dirty and open and maddeningly close to – not a release, something less familiar. He doesn’t feel he has any control over the soft cries that come from him as his knuckles turn white and his back twists and he breathes out hard, eyes wide open, as he looks between his own legs to watch come bead and then slowly dribble out from the slick head of his cock. 

His cock doesn’t jerk from the ejaculation. He’s still completely hard. Chris puts one of his fingers on the head of Charlie’s cock to aid the final spurts out onto his stomach and Charlie feels his eyes dampen from the frustration. Charlie twists against the feeling, his toes clenching, and looks back at Chris, who is watching him with perverse delight.

Chris’s fingers withdraw, and then he puts one back in, watching Charlie clench and shudder from overstimulation.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Charlie says with feeling, letting his eyes fall closed.

“Won’t do that to you next time,” Chris’s voice says close to Charlie’s ear. “Unless I feel like it.”

Charlie keeps his eyes closed and feels some tissues, wielded by Chris, sweep across his belly. He hears Chris’s quiet breathing. He feels the last decade fall away.

*

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Charlie says, haphazardly retrieving clothes, then checking his wallet, keys and phone are still in his coat pockets. He hadn’t intended to actually fall asleep. The sun is beginning to set outside.

“What’s the time? I’ve been here for fucking hours, why did you let me sleep for so long?” he shouts at Chris, who is sitting at his desk, looking at Charlie impassively.

“What the fuck am I going to say? It’s not like how it was before; I can’t just give every moment of my time to _this_ , whatever this fucking is.”

“Come back in two weeks,” Chris says, as he stands up and walks across the room to face Charlie head-on. He’s not _listening_. Or he is, but he’s not taking what’s presented as a given. Typical Chris, again.

“I don’t have _time_ ,” Charlie says, feeling the weight of everything ebb then rise back up within him. “I’m contracted up to the eyeballs for a fucking age and… it’s not just _me_ on my own, anymore; I’m responsible for all these fucking _people_.”

“It’s not my fault you’re trying to please everyone,” Chris says, his face so close to Charlie’s it’s making Charlie feel quite angry. “Working so hard on so many things. You’re everywhere: screening Q and As, _GQ_ , fucking _panel shows_ , Charlie. Scared you’ll never work again if you turn something down. Learn to say no.”

“No,” Charlie says.

Chris reaches out to tightly grip Charlie’s wrist. Large strong fingers. Despite everything, Charlie still feels his heart race.

“Not to me.”

“If we’re not even going to work on anything,” Charlie swallows. “Then this is certifiably insane.”

Chris gives a derisive snort, precisely representative of the scepticism he likes to convey. “Of course,” he says. “Because that’s what makes all of this sensible. The _art_.”

“ _Are_ we actually going to write anything?”

“Do you want to? You’re not some protégé anymore. You’re much hotter than I am, Charlie. It sounds like you’ve got enough on.”

Somewhere deep and dark within him, Charlie glows at the idea he might have once been something to Chris as grand as a protégé. 

“We can decide for ourselves,” Chris tells him. “A standing monthly appointment. Until I get bored of you.”

“A standing monthly appointment? How am I going to explain that one?”

“Have you tried therapy yet?” Chris asks. “You could start going. You might need it.”

It brings out a stupid grin in Charlie, and Chris’s mouth twists upwards. Chris lets go of his wrist, and Charlie leaves. The red mark there is starting to fade by the time he steps out onto the pavement. 

Somewhere under the sickening fear, he feels triumphant.


End file.
